ChoraChori’s Founder, Philip Holmes, is running the London Marathon to raise funds for additional care needs at the ChoraChori refuge in Kathmandu.

What do you buy a masochist for Christmas?

Today my brand new Garmin Forerunner 30 runner’s watch tracked my time, distance, calories etc in a training run for this year’s London Marathon. My strategy during training is to ignore speed and distance in favour of building up endurance. Today’s goal was to run for two hours. It was bitterly cold, but the sun was shining and 2 hours and 22 minutes later (sustained by one bottle of raspberry flavour Lucozade Sport – yuk) I’d completed just over half marathon distance without stopping. Factor in those notorious Devon hills – the climb out of Thurlestone was particularly memorable in this regard – and that time was pretty reasonable. My watch even grudgingly told me that my fitness level was “good”. The cheek of it.

No pain, no gain and I am putting myself through this to raise funds for ChoraChori to meet additional care costs in Nepal that have arisen this week. I’d thought we were OK for a while following our very successful Big Give Christmas Challenge (thanks if you donated!). But yesterday my friend and colleague at ChoraChori-Nepal, Bhaskar Karki, e mailed me to say that he needed to recruit additional staff members, adding to our already overstretched budget. The reason for that was that in November we admitted two very traumatised little girls who are both rape victims. One of them had been thrown out of the family home by her stepfather and after months of sleeping rough she seems to be semi-feral. Although only nine, she is already grey-haired. Bhaskar tells me that, such is the scale of these girls’ needs, they require one-to-one care, 24/7, hence his additional staffing request.

I am very aware that we have taken up a challenge that has taken us into turbulent, uncharted waters where few others would dare to venture. And that challenge necessitates a long term commitment that other NGOs would baulk at. But this is what we do and, historically, we’ve done that very well. Now we are dealing with unprecedented degrees of child trauma and if we have to find the funds for one-to-one care then so be it. A carer costs in the region of £110 per month and for two highly disturbed girls we need 4 carers for 24 hour cover. £440 times 12 comes to £5,280 which is my revised target in this year’s Marathon.

Please support me and the hard-pressed local staff in Kathmandu by using the button below that will take you straight to my online sponsorship page. The site accepts donations in any major currency that will convert into sterling.